Abstract
This paper presents a measurement and simulation based study of parallel I/O in a high-performance cluster system: the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) DEC Alpha Supercluster. The measurements were used to characterize the performance bottlenecks and the throughput limits at the compute and I/O nodes, and to provide realistic input parameters to PioSim, a simulation environment we have developed to investigate parallel I/O performance issues in cluster systems. PioSim was used to obtain a detailed characterization of parallel I/O performance, in the high-performance cluster system, for different regular access patterns and different system configurations. This paper also explores the use of local disks at the compute nodes for parallel I/O, and finds that the local disk architecture outperforms the traditional parallel I/O over remote I/O node disks architecture, even when as much as 68-75% of the requests from each compute node goes to remote disks.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 332-339 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing - Proceedings |
| State | Published - 1996 |
| Event | Proceedings of the 1996 8th IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing - New Orleans, LA, USA Duration: Oct 23 1996 → Oct 26 1996 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Engineering